It is very likely that you are not investing enough with the maintenance efforts on your production cranes!
Most organizations do not spend nearly enough on planned maintenance and end up paying far higher costs in unplanned breakdowns. It's well documented that investing effectively in hoist and crane maintenance can improve the bottom line significantly, by increasing planned and predictive maintenance to lower the much higher costs of reactive maintenance. Unfortunately, what level of investment will be optimal to maximize the investment is hard to determine.
CRANE 1 partners with our customers to maximize the safety and productivity of their overhead cranes and hoists. We do this by applying our deep industry experience to perform quality safety inspections and reliability assessment. Successful inspection and assessment programs are based on the knowledgeable and experienced Inspectors spending enough time on each crane to be able to accurately identify safety, maintenance and reliability issues. The frequency of the inspections and reliability assessments must be often enough to discover problems in their infancy.
After the inspection and assessment, we outline any severe problems on the equipment with our site contact and document the findings in our InSpec report. The InSpec report identifies the condition of major components and provides you with images of recorded deficiencies. We also recommend any maintenance programs that should be considered outside of the current maintenance practices.
Cranes represent a sizable investment for an organization, thus determining the proper level of maintenance should be a priority. Appropriate levels of maintenance are especially important for companies that depend on overhead cranes as a part of their production process. Cranes utilized in manufacturing processes may be used up to 24 hours a day / 7 days a week. An unplanned breakdown can at worst shut down a production line and at best slow production down until repairs can be completed or back-up cranes are put into service. Depending on the impact of the crane breakdown; the costs of lost production and unplanned maintenance could be in the tens of thousands of dollars per hour.
Optimal maintenance of high use process cranes can significantly reduce the overall operating costs associated with downtime while boosting safety and productivity. Studies of OSHA incident rates have concluded that organizations that have stronger planned preventive maintenance programs have significantly fewer accidents and fatalities. The mindset that improves the orientation and approach toward overall cost reduction with planned and preventive maintenance naturally results in fewer breakdowns and improved productivity.
To develop a strategy for proactive maintenance, a company must conduct a thorough equipment assessment with reliability survey to gain the required facts.
A proper overhead crane and hoist reliability survey is based on assessment techniques not used in typical overhead crane and hoist inspections. In a reliability survey, we determine likely failure points, recommend future maintenance efforts and identify recommended spares by combining the results of the crane's current assessed condition with information obtained from the available repair history and results from high tech diagnostic tools such as Oil Analysis, Infrared Thermography, Vibration Analysis as well as Non-Destructive Testing. The reliability survey provides an understanding of what repairs are going to be needed in advance of expected failures so that maintenance activities can be scheduled to maximize productivity and increase uptime over the remaining lifetime of the equipment.
Incremental additional investments in proper maintenance on overhead cranes will extend their useful life of by many years and provides an excellent return.
When breakdowns and repair costs of a particular crane or hoist system become uncontrollable because the equipment is not adequately sized for the current application, outdated control technology or the machine has reached the end of its serviceable life; we can help plan an upgrade or replacement. We can help you decide to replace or upgrade by assisting with expected future repair costs that will help you justify the capital expense investment.
CRANE 1 has access to more brands of cranes and hoists as well as state of the art control technology to provide you with modernization or replacement of your crane equipment. We can upgrade the control technology with Variable Frequency Drives that provide ramped speed control and dynamic braking to reduce the stresses on the structures and eliminate brake wear. Radio control technology can allow you to operate the crane wirelessly and also remove much of the control wiring which helps reduce wiring issues. CRANE on through our Engineered Crane Group can help you specify and install Hoists and cranes from CMAA class "C," moderate duty up to class "E" (Severe Duty).